Amazon China expands its selection to 10 million imported items

The China division of the world’s largest online retailer, which launched its shopping portal for imported goods in November 2014, added 2 million products in February alone.

Amazon China, the China division of Amazon.com Inc., announced this week a significant expansion in the selection of imported goods it offers online on the section of Amazon.cn called Haiwaigou, which means “buy from overseas” in Chinese. Amazon said it had added more than 2 million products in February, bringing the total selection on Haiwaigou to 10 million.

The Haiwaigou section of Amazon.cn makes it easier for Chinese consumers to purchase products from Amazon’s U.S. site as it translates the product pages into Chinese and offers such local payment options as Alipay, a service backed by China e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

Among the products introduced last month are items from such designer brands as Ivanka Trump and Isaac Mizrahi. In order to sell through Haiwaigou on Amazon.cn, U.S. merchants need to enable the "ship to China" option when they set up the product listing on Amazon’s U.S. site, according to Amazon.

Amazon is No. 1 in the Internet Retailer 2015 Top 500, which ranks North American retailers by online sales, and No. 5 in the China 500, which ranks retailers operating in China by their sales in that country.

Amazon says that, after conducting many tests, it has connected the systems of Amazon.com and Amazon.cn and can now automatically translate into Chinese an English-language page by using software after a merchant on Amazon.com adds a product listing. Previously, Amazon employees in China had to translate the content of English-language pages into Chinese manually and then generate the Chinese pages, a time-consuming process that was prone to mistakes.

Amazon, which is the leading overseas retailer in terms of online sales in China, also introduced in August limited-time sales on Haiwaigou. Amazon says sales from flash sales on Haiwaigou have grown nearly tenfold from six months ago. Amazon fulfills the orders from its warehouse in Shanghai’s free-trade zone, one of 10 such entry points into China designed to smooth the process of importing goods into China.

Amazon also says consumers can get their orders in three to five days if the e-retailer stores the product in the free-trade zone, or in about a week if the merchant selling on Amazon has to ship the other from the U.S.